Lurid Beauty review: National Gallery of Victoria's showcase of Australian surrealism not what you might expect

By Robert Nelson

Damage 1996, by Anne Wallace. Some contemporary work in the exhibition is more surreal than examples closer to the original European movement.

NGV Australia, Federation Square

Until January 31

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A strangely obscene piece of disembodied furniture: Shhhh Men at work I, 2013, by Claire Lambe.

A woman with movie-star looks lies back on a clinical couch in front of an empty chair. She looks up with a wide-eyed vulnerable expression, with "lidless eyes", as TS Eliot said.

It's a painting by Anne Wallace called Talking cure, a term coined by a female patient in the early days of psychotherapy, where an analyst would encourage the patient to unburden the psyche of its unconscious repression.

Access to the unconscious is one of the great themes of surrealism; and Wallace's painting is well chosen for the exhibition Lurid Beauty: Australian Surrealism And Its Echoes at the NGV. The painting wallows in fantasy, the romantic appeal of some hypnotic medical intimacy, but it also makes you feel uncomfortable, fearful of the manipulative game between patient and therapist.

Unburdening the psyche: Anne Wallace's Talking cure, 2010, touches on one of the classic themes of surrealism.

The empty chair is behind her, and you assume that the doctor has stood up and approached her, close up, looming above her to take control of her gaze. The adjacent wall allows no space for the rest of her body.

She is dreamy but compromised, as if the doctor owns her hysteria.

Lurid Beauty is a clever exhibition, folding together a history of Australian surrealism from the 1930s onward and contemporary art that deals with the unconscious.

It isn't what you might expect. The contemporary work is more uncanny and surreal than the examples closer to the original European movement around 1930. Post-war Angry Penguins like Albert Tucker have expressionistic motivations rather than an interest in the unconscious.

As the curator Simon Maidment observes, surrealism was never a style. Alas, with the exception of the conceptual and hilarious Barry Humphries, Australians turned surrealism into style.

The arch surreal-stylist is James Gleeson whose work over a long career is more about combining incoherent imagery in a lyrical, primeval way. In the Turneresque​ Icons of Hazard the several vignettes and oceanic broth that contains them fail to narrate the movement of ideas from a hidden wish to a psychological institution like "mother" or "jealousy".

The closer we get to the present day, the more the surrealist legacy makes sense. Claire Lambe's shhhh men at work is a strangely obscene piece of disembodied furniture, where a circular sponge cushion has been split to create a cleft in which a liner-sock acts as vulva. A female shoe plops out the bottom and a plate of glass threatens to crush the delicate ensemble while at the same time affording it no privacy. The work intrudes on your imagination, with annoying and provocative allusions, part evocation, part mockery, part allegory. So too with the paintings of Louise Hearman, which are beautifully executed essays in obsession, with teeth springing up in the landscape, as if the site of a fearful and predatory kiss or terrible guardianship of a secret.

A searching and ingenious spirit inhabits the work of Susan Fereday, who invokes the surrealist Rene Magritte in her image of a pipe called Remember me. Magritte's​ painting from 1929 is called This is not a pipe, a paradox where the painting denounces it own illusion. In an age where pipes no longer connote father, Fereday's old man becomes the speaking subject. It asks to be remembered rather than suppressed.

Three of the artists play clever tricks with furniture. In her shudder (Dialogue), Susan Norrie makes two chests unnaturally elegant by hoisting them on precariously long and thin legs. The units seem exaggeratedly gendered in a way that produces neurosis, a bit like Rosslynd Piggott's towering bed that extrapolates the awe of the parental act.

Stuart Ringholt gives you the heebie-jeebies by tipping back an ornamental armchair and repositioning the legs, so that the backrest is now the seat. Called Untitled (Baroque), this allegory of inversion unseats your expectations of "the right place" for your body. Bizarrely, you feel unsettled when you contemplate that the wrong plane might still be comfortable.

But the queen of discomfort remains Anne Wallace. Another of her paintings shows a woman with blood trickling down her legs, not from menstruation but from unseen wounds all around behind her short dress. In a nightmare, she leaks with some consequence of a perversion: it's irrational but real in the mind.